Jesting Infinitely (Or at Least Until September)

Because I like taking on gigantic projects and then giving up on them before I've even properly begun, I decided to do Infinite Summer. Even though I almost never buy books, I hied myself to a Barnes and Noble and bought the only copy of Infinite Jest, the same one that sat there for years, neglected, just getting sadder and more tattered looking as people picked it up and then, realizing its heft, put it back. To be fair, I only bought it because someone stole our library's copy (can we talk about this for a minute? Who the hell is stealing all the movies and books Alex and I want? How hard is it to return this stuff?). I fully expected to give up after reading the first sentence, but instead I've held on, mostly on pace, for about a month. Okay, so I'm always 40 pages behind, and this weekend I had a marathon session to catch myself up. But basically I'm on track. It's weird.
So, if you don't know, Infinite Jest is a weird book. A lot of people (what am I talking about? I mean Chase) have asked me what it's about. It's hard to explain. Mostly it's about a tennis academy, but also it's about an addiction treatment facility. Apparently DFW used to play tennis, which I guess explains the exhaustively thorough descriptions of gameplay. It's a difficult book to read, for sure. For me, anyway. I've always had a lot of trouble with reading things that I'm not immediately attracted to (which was why I wasn't a very good English major) and the truth is that a lot of this book isn't easy to fall in love with. But parts of it are, and in the Dave Eggers-penned intro we all learn that this book will change our lives. We'll see. My life is pretty malleable to begin with, so it shouldn't take much. Expect updates as I continue.
Of note: A character brings about his own demise by placing his head in a microwave oven.